Approaches to Efficient Resource-Constrained Project Rescheduling

The intrinsic and pervasive uncertainty of the real world causes unforeseen disturbances during the execution of plans. The continuous adaptation of existing schedules is necessary in response to the corresponding disruptions. Affected Operations Rescheduling (AOR) and Matchup Scheduling (MUP) have proven to be efficient techniques for this purpose, as they take only a subset of future activities into account. However, these approaches have mainly been investigated for the job shop scheduling problem, which is too restrictive for many practical scheduling problems outside the shop floor. Thus, this paper analyzes and describes how the respective concepts can be extended for the more generic problem class of the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP). The conducted evaluation reveals that particularly our generalized version of AOR (GAOR) can yield significant performance improvements in comparison to the strategy of rescheduling all future activities.